The reader of Ezekiel is impressed immediately with the intensely personal nature of the writing. Indeed, as Joel Rosenberg notes, “The pervasive dominance of the ‘I’ voice, the persistence of precise dates and of an almost purely sequential chronology and the private, literate and bookish manner of the language and idioms give the text much of the quality of a journal” (pp. 194-95). This journal or record of Ezekiel's pilgrimage as an exile called to be a prophet is unique among the OT prophets. These first three chapters of his journal leave no doubt in the reader's mind that the prophet is above all under the direction of the God who called him. Indeed, the whole book “stops distinctly short of revealing the prophet's feelings, despite its lush generosity in rendering the divine pathos, and even despite its willingness otherwise to render the prophet's astonishment and dismay over things coming to pass” (Rosenberg, 196).